Back home from Textilforum

I arrived back home from Eindhoven yesterday evening, after a week of all things good and fibrey (or stringy). More than a hundred of spindles were spun upon, masses of tablets turned, waffles and chocolate eaten, large quantities of coffee and tea consumed, and laughter and fun abounded.

The Textilforum was everything I had hoped and wished for: A meeting place for craftspeople and scientists, a place to chat and exchange knowledge and personal experiences with different historical techniques, to network and have fun together, a place to do some shopping for textile-crafts-related things and tools that cannot be found just everywhere, and an opportunity to have some nice, juicy bits of science that requires more than just one or two skilled craftspersons. So overall, a complete success, and I am sure that every visitor to the Forum also went home with something new and delightful learned.

For the experiment, I had the joy and privilege of working together with fifteen wonderful spinners to generate a really large dataset that will help a lot for researching spinning and spindle whorls in the future. This dataset and lots of number-crunching from it will probably keep me on my toes for the next few days and weeks, but the data already looks very, very promising. The first results were already presented to the spinners and lecture audience on Saturday evening, and more results are the topic of my talk at the liveARCH conference in Hungary in October. A good reason to set to work on all the cops of yarn and questionnaires!